Department of Public Safety officials say they’ve tied the arson fire at the Guv’s Mansion in 2008 to actions at the Republican National Convention in Minnesota that same summer.
After reviewing surveillance video from around the mansion before it burned, on June 8, 2008, investigators with the Texas Ranger-led DPS task force identified a white Jeep Cherokee whose occupants were taking photos of the building four days before the Molotov cocktail-caused fire. Through a “process of elimination,” investigators were able to find the Jeep in question and have interviewed the driver and two passengers, none of whom have been named, but all of whom are apparently now considered “persons of interest” in the investigation. (Video of the Jeep can be found here.)
And, as it turns out, according to DPS, investigators have also established a “direct link” between the unnamed persons of interest to an “Austin-based anarchist group” that itself was linked to a “planned attack” at the RNC in Minnesota in September 2008, an attack that also involved Molotov cocktails.
Our coverage of that incident, reported and written by Diana Welch, can be found here, here and here.
Previous coverage of the mansion fire can be found here.
This article appears in February 11 • 2011.